Climate Change Doesn’t Spare the Smallest

In a normal year, biologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs spend about six months in Costa Rica, where they conduct research and pursue conservation efforts in Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), a World Heritage Site in the northwest that encompasses a network of parks and preserves they helped establish in the 1980s and that has grown to more than 400,000 acres, including marine, dry forest, cloud forest, and rain forest environments.

In 2020 that is where the married couple was when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the world, and compelled them to extend their stay in the virus-free forest until the fall, when they felt safe enough to travel back to their other home in Philadelphia.

“With modern laptops and internet, we could watch the world go by from the safety of the forest,” says Janzen, a biology professor in the School of Arts & Sciences.

The extra time in the forest gave them added time for reflection, some of the fruits of which appear in a piece published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, part of a special issue on global insect decline.

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